What Can Isolated Terpenes Do For Cannabis Flower?

Terpenes have come to the forefront of extraction artistry over the last couple of years. These essential oils are extracted and isolated from cannabis and then mixed into cannabinoid extracts. Kind of like cooking spices for weed concentrates, terpenes can heighten and alter flavor, but also change the medical effects of a wax and the high as well.

And the boom in terpene technology has now led to experimentation outside the realm of extracts and into the cannabis flower itself. Experimenters have even tested out what adding terpenes could do to dried out buds which have lost their flavor. One such pioneer is Matt Stangel at the Willamette Week, who wanted to see what just a few drops of dank terpenes could do to some bud that’s past its prime.

Not surprisingly, the innovation of applying terpenes to flowers comes from the medical sector of the marijuana market. Ben Cassidy, co-founder of Portland, Oregon’s True Terpenes, started in the industry working at an online medical marijuana certification clinic, and realized that terpenes themselves could be a crucial role for patients.

Cassidy told the Week that he and his business party became interested in “what made strains of cannabis more potent, flavorful or well-suited for complementary treatment of certain health conditions.” Terps, they found, could alter the medical and psychoactive qualities of a weed strain, even after that strain had been harvested, cured, and extracted.

What Stangel wanted to figure out was, if you could use terpenes to make good weed better or different, could you use them to effectively bring dead weed back to life?

He applied some Super Lemon Haze terpenes from True Terpenes, just one drop added to a few grams of months-old, dried-up flower that had gone through a grinder. After shaking them up and letting them sit, he found that the added terps did not exactly do wonders for the flavor profile of the stale buds, but they did give some added bite to their stone.

The added Haze, he said, “did in fact lift my mood and influence divergent mental patterns, which were never traits of the weed I started with.”

Similar results were found with adding another terpenes to the stale buds. Not great for flavor, but it can indeed make buds that are about to go out in the trash viable for a good high and maybe even medical treatment.